How to Support a Loved One Involved in a Romance Scam
Look beyond the scam itself to ask deeper questions and support your loved one’s emotional needs.
Guest post by Katharine Tober
From the outside, a scam can seem painfully obvious. You can see the inconsistencies. You can see that the pictures are probably stolen or fake. You can see that every conversation eventually leads to another emergency, another excuse, or another request for money. But the victim sees themselves as helping someone they care deeply about. The scammer has psychologically manipulated your loved one to build a trusting relationship while isolating them from friends and family.
Emotional Support: Consider the Scenario
The relationship may not be genuine, but the victim’s feelings are very real. That is one of the most important things to understand. Your goal is to keep communication open. It can be tempting to walk into the room with a stack of evidence, but shame rarely helps someone think more clearly. In fact, anger, criticism, and humiliation can push a victim further from family and closer to the scammer.
Look beyond the scam itself to ask a deeper question: What is missing from this person’s life that the scammer appears to provide? Are they simply emotionally vulnerable, or is something affecting their judgment?
Romance scams can happen to people of any age and intelligence. Loneliness, grief, and isolation increase vulnerability. But be aware of significant changes in memory, reasoning, personality, or decision-making. In some situations, it may be appropriate to contact a family doctor, geriatric social worker, psychiatrist, or another healthcare professional. In some cases, professionals may suggest a formal capacity assessment when there are serious concerns about whether the individual understands the consequences of their financial decisions.
Tactical Support: Document Everything You Can
Details that seem unimportant in the moment may eventually help a bank, law enforcement, lawyer, or fraud investigator understand what has happened. If you have access to information:
Save phone numbers, email addresses, photographs, social-media profiles, banking information, and copies of messages.
Keep records of money transfers, gift cards, cryptocurrency payments, or packages that your loved one has sent.
Contact the victim’s financial institutions to let them know you believe your loved one is targeted in a scam, if possible. The bank may place notes on the account, watch for unusual transactions, or speak directly with the account holder.
Watch for signs that the financial manipulation is spreading beyond the victim’s own savings. Scammers may convince victims to borrow money, increase credit limits, cash in investments, take out loans, sell property, or ask friends and relatives for financial help.
Secrecy is a major warning sign. The scammers warn victims not to discuss the transactions with bank employees or family members. They may convince your loved one that you are jealous of their new relationship, for example.
Long-Term Support: Continue Your Compassion
In the end, romance scams can create a powerful emotional dependency that can resemble an addiction. The financial element is often easier to overcome than the emotional aspects. Just as someone struggling with alcohol, drugs, gambling, or another destructive compulsion may deny the harm, a romance-scam victim may continue returning to the relationship even as it destroys their finances, their security, and their relationships with the people who truly love them. That is why leaving them completely alone to “figure it out” can be so dangerous.
In many cases, the answer is companionship. Romance scammers are incredibly skilled at identifying loneliness. For someone who is deeply lonely, that attention can become incredibly powerful. This is why simply removing the scammer may not solve the entire problem. Even when the contact ends, the loneliness remains.
No one person can provide constant companionship. But you can help create opportunities for real connection. That might mean helping the person join a seniors’ center, church group, exercise class, volunteer organization, grief-support group, or community activities. For some people, moving into a retirement community or assisted-living residence may provide the social connection and sense of purpose they were missing.
In our aunt’s case, living in a seniors’ residence eventually addressed her feelings of isolation and has given her the opportunity to meet real people, make friends, and become involved in her community to build a new life.
This will take time. But real relationships also offer something a scammer never can: genuine presence. So, while you are contacting banks, saving evidence, and trying to stop the financial losses, do not forget to ask what the person may be emotionally searching for. Stopping the scam is essential, but helping to heal the loneliness may be what prevents the next one.
Katharine Tober is the author of Losing Margaret: A Romance Scam Becomes a Family Nightmare. She never planned to write a book about romance scams. In fact, before it happened to her family, she knew very little about them. That changed when her aunt became involved in an online romance scam that nearly cost her everything and almost tore apart the family.
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